


Before I Sleep

by ammcj062



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Additional Warnings Apply, Case Fic, Caves, Claustrophobia, Gen, Supernatural Summergen Fic Exchange, Supernatural Summergen Fic Exchange 2017
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-13
Updated: 2018-09-13
Packaged: 2019-07-11 16:49:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15976424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ammcj062/pseuds/ammcj062
Summary: Sam and Dean investigate a rash of deaths in Mammoth Cave National Park.





	Before I Sleep

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Dizzojay](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dizzojay/gifts).



> There are going to be some very claustrophobic scenes in here. Please beware.

_Cave City, Kentucky_

With the windows closed and the curtains drawn all day, the temperature in the cabin had slowly climbed over ninety degrees. Sweat runs freely down Conor’s face and his lips are cracked from dehydration; despite this, he doesn’t move from his curled position in front of the kitchen cabinets. He rocks back and forth while his bare feet slip across the tile repetitively, moaning softly. 

He is so tired. 

Pressing his face against the cabinets he lets out a soft sob and scratches at his arms. It’s been three days since he’d had even a nap. The first night he’d tossed relentlessly in bed, desperate to sleep after an exhausting hike that day. The second night he’d taken to pacing, hoping to accumulate his weariness until it could overcome his strange bout of insomnia. Now the third night gathers and he sits on the floor, desperate.

His eyes are dry and sandy whether he keeps them open or shut. His mind races aimlessly, too fatigued to focus for long. His ears ring with an eerie sound like babies crying in the other room. He had come into the kitchen to check. There are no babies here and his cabin is too isolated from the others for the crying to come from another family.

Conor covers his ears and curls tighter, whimpering. Dust drips from his eyes and mixes with the sweat on his face to create grimy facsimiles of tear tracks.

“Just let me sleep,” he mutters to whatever is crying inside his cabin. He squeezes his palms against head until it feels like his skull will burst. “Please just let me sleep.” 

\----------------------------------- 

Beneath the drone of the local news there’s a curse and a scuffle. Sam sticks his head out of the motel bathroom to fish eye Dean, who’s half-crouched on the edge of his bed like he aborted a scramble upwards when he heard Sam put his razor down and didn’t have time to fling himself prone. There aren’t any guns on the bed or electronics next to him and Dean had wandered away from their research half an hour ago to the allure of infomercials. 

“What?”

“Hm?” Dean widens his eyes and shakes his head but his cool unflappable act stopped working on Sam when he was twelve.

Sam studies Dean suspiciously but Dean refuses to twitch. Eventually Sam gives up. “Nothing,” he mutters, retreating back to the bathroom. He can hear Dean resettling on the bed before he turns on the water to rinse his face. 

When Sam leaves the bathroom Dean has wandered back to their books. Sam looks at his laptop, sighs, and throws himself in Dean’s old position.

“Anything?”

Dean grunts a negative and flips through more pages. “Dwarves, rock spirits, pagan gods, cursed miners, Japanese ghosts, nothing about limestone or any of them killing you by insomnia.”

“Bobby?”

“Nope.” 

Sam drapes an arm over his eyes, wrangling with the familiar frustration of having no leads and no clue what they were hunting. There was definitely something going on. People don’t spontaneously start crying limestone and then die of exhaustion on their own. Yet two weeks of interviews, wild goose chases, and research left them no closer to cracking whatever had happened to the four hikers who’d died since summer had started. 

Dean shuts his book and scrapes his chair backwards. There’s a rustle of fabric and then Dean whacks Sam’s leg. “C’mon. I’m hungry. You want tacos?”

They’ve been cooped up in a stuffy hotel room all day, cranking the insufficient AC as far as it will go. By this point anything Sam reads he’ll only have to re-read tomorrow. “Yeah,” he mumbles, and swings his legs off the bed.

“Aw, don’t pout. I’ll get you one of those margaritas with the umbrellas.”

\----------------------------------- 

Dean gets margaritas with umbrellas for both of them – and steak tacos for himself and grilled chicken tacos for Sam. They listen to the tinny music and see who can load up more salsa onto the complementary chips while they wait. Dean plays dirty by asking the waitress to bring them hotter salsa when she comes around to refill the bowl. Sam retaliates by dumping hot sauce all over the chips.

When their food arrives they need another round of margaritas and they’re both discreetly trying to wipe their noses when the other isn’t looking. After they’ve stuffed themselves on unauthentic Mexican food – “I don’t want to hear it California boy, my tacos my way,” – the stressed knot in Sam’s shoulders has eased and he flicks spitball wads of straw wrappers at his brother until Dean cracks and returns fire. 

Following their brief but intense war the conversation swings back to their current job. 

“Look, we’ve read up on everything there is that’s rock-related and sleep-related and found nothing. Next step is to go have a look ourselves.”

“We tried that already,” Sam points out. “Three times. We don’t know where any of the victims went and the park is too big to wander around guessing.”

“We already interviewed the coroner twice,” Dean counters, waving his cocktail umbrella for emphasis. “And the desk clerks and the cleaning lady and the tour guide and the intake nurse. At least wandering around is better than sitting on our hands.”

Sam can’t really argue against that so he drains the watery dregs of his margarita instead. Dean throws down a handful of crumpled bills to pay the check. Sam is first into the parking lot, holding the door open behind him for Dean. A man on the other side bumps into Sam and keeps walking without a word. 

“Hey,” Sam says. “Heads up next time.”

The man turns towards Sam slowly, expression blank for a minute before something clicks in his mind. “Sorry,” he mutters.

The restaurant is at the end of a long road with no public transportation. Sam glances around but there’s nobody in the parking lot obviously looking for the man. He hopes he hadn’t driven himself here.

“You okay?”

There’s another long pause while the man digests Sam’s question. “I’m… I’m so tired.” As he looks at Sam, something powdery falls down his face. Sam stiffens.

“Dean.” 

Loitering nearby, Dean is quick to step closer. “Yeah?”

Sam reaches out slowly. The man doesn’t seem to mind. He brushes the cheekbone underneath the man’s left eye, feeling grit beneath his fingers. In the sinking dusk light he shows his fingers to Dean. 

“Oh, shit,” Dean breathes.

“Yeah.”

Dean is quick to flip out his badge. “Sir, I’m Agent Rose with the National Park Service. I need you to come with me.” The man staggers slightly when Dean takes his arm and starts towing him towards the Impala but he manages to make his unsteady way there without falling. Dean tosses Sam the keys to unlock the backseat. The minute they have him seated he topples sideways and closes his eyes.

Sam checks his pulse. It’s faint and racing. “Still alive. Hospital?”

Dean grunts a negative and turns the ignition. “Didn’t help the last one. We can ward the motel.” 

Dean knows as well as Sam that trying to ward against an unknown assailant has a slim to none chance of working. But he’s right about the hospital. 

Dean’s foot hits the gas before Sam finishes closing his door. Sam sits sideways, doing his best to monitor the man in their backseat, but he’s not sure what he’s looking for. Other than the limestone dusted down their faces and the signs of death by exhaustion, the local coroner had thrown up his hands and said he left the rest for God to figure out. 

The man survives the short drive to their motel. He stirs weakly out of his stupor, having never really fallen asleep, when Sam prods him. “What’s your name?”

“My...” 

“Tell me your name.”

“Floyd.”

“Floyd, my name is Sam. I need you to get up. Can you do that, Floyd?”

Floyd twitches each time he hears his name but doesn’t seem to register Sam’s question between it. Regardless, he moves easily enough when Sam tugs on his elbow. They take small steps to keep Floyd from toppling over. Dean keeps the door open for them, the lights in their room already switched on. Sam walks him to the nearest bed, which he topples onto with a frustrated sob. “I’m so tired.”

Sam exchanges a worried glance with Dean. How are they supposed to protect this man if they don’t even know what they’re up against? “When was the last time you slept?”

“I don’t…” Floyd’s fingers clutch rhythmically at the covers and he trails off.

“Floyd?”

He twitches. “Third day. No sleep.” His eyes flutter but don’t open all the way, dusting his pillow with limestone. “Make them stop crying.”

“Stop who crying?”

“Babies. Babies in the next room.”

Sam checks with Dean; neither of them can hear babies. “What else do you hear?”

“Please stop,” Floyd mutters. He covers his ears. “Stop.”

Dean steps forward with a map before they lose him entirely. “Hey, Floyd. You were hiking three days ago, right?” Sam helps haul Floyd into a sitting position so they can dump the map in his lap, gently pulling away his hands from his ears. He looks around wildly until Dean repeatedly snaps his fingers in front of his nose. Dean moves his hand down to tap at the map.

“Where were you hiking, huh, Floyd?” 

Sam thinks they won’t be able to get an answer out of him but eventually Floyd’s half-open gaze pauses on a specific spot and he laboriously presses a finger down near one of the bends of the river. 

“Alright,” Dean breathes. He doesn’t bother to move Floyd’s finger before marking the spot. “Alright, you did good, Floyd. You did real good. Just hang in there.”

Floyd groans and his eyes roll backwards, unresponsive to Sam’s prodding or questions. Sam eases him down horizontally again. Dean tosses Sam the salt and they make a circle. They place iron above the doorway and cat’s eye shells on the tables. Purification incense burns in all four cardinal directions. Dean lays out an assortment of knives and they wait.

When the last rays of sunlight die from the sky Floyd sighs and doesn’t breathe in again. Dean shoves the books off the table and curses a blue streak.

\----------------------------------- 

In the morning Sam checks with the coroner while Dean updates Bobby. As they expected the preliminary cause of death is exhaustion. Dean’s conversation with Bobby is equally short; he reports the three day timeframe and sound of crying babies to add to their list of symptoms and Bobby promises to hit the books. 

Soon after Sam and Dean lace up their hiking boots and hit the pavement. In addition to weapons they pack a map and compass each, flashlights, extra batteries, chalk, canteens, high-calorie snacks, and a first aid. Given that two of the other hikers were here specifically to search out caves, they expect this trek will lead them underground at some point. 

They drive into the state park in grim silence. Sam eyes how Dean strangles the steering wheel and waits until they’ve pulled off to the parking at the head of the trail. “There was nothing we could do to help him.”

“Yeah,” Dean growls, hands twisting to make the wheel faintly squeak. “But he didn’t deserve to die like that when we were sitting right there.”

Sam doesn’t have anything to say to that. After a moment of silence Dean kills the engine and swings open his door. “Let’s go hunt this bastard down.”

There are a handful of trails in the area Dean circled last night but they started with the one that winds furthest away from the river. If the creature was on a more accessible trail the number of fatalities would have been higher. Small mercies, Sam supposes. 

Including short rest breaks the trek outbound should take two hours, but Sam and Dean periodically sweep sections beyond the path so it takes nearly twice that. At the beginning it was cool enough for a pleasant breeze. Now as the sun climbs higher sweat begins to prickle Sam’s brow. Summer insects call raucously and the leaves rustle with birds and other small animals. It is occasionally hell on the nerves given they have no idea what the creature they’re hunting looks or sounds like.

As they begin the gradual arc that will turn them back towards their car, Sam spies freshly furrowed dirt that must have been overturned by the half-rotted tree trunk sunken in one end of the rut. The other end disappears behind a thick cluster of thorny bushes. Sam pushes them aside and sees the faint remnants of a path wind between a narrow gap in the thorns and away into the woods, nearly invisible from elsewhere on the trail.

Sam whistles and waves for Dean to come over. “Look,” he says softly when Dean is close enough for them to talk quietly. “Someone cleared an old path recently.” He gestures to the half-rotted tree trunk and then to the abandoned trail. 

Dean can read the same evidence Sam did. He jerks his head towards the path, already half-stepping towards it. “Let’s have a look.”

They pick their way through the thicket, then down a hill and up another, digging their hands into the loose soil to grab at tree roots to keep themselves balanced. More than a few trees are nearly parallel to the ground, their grip in the soil tenuous at best. It’s likely why the trail was closed in the first place. At the top of the next hill they nearly lose the trail again until Dean spots a thin alley cleared of vegetation in the valley.

Sam sips frequently at his water bottle, wishing for the breeze from earlier to come back and cool the sweat dripping down his nose. Shaded as they are beneath the trees, the sun’s heat still bakes them slowly as it radiates down from the canopy. The breeze earlier in the day has been replaced by a stuffy stillness. Even the animals have quieted down, taking shelter against the oppressive heat. 

The follow a narrow valley between two sets of hills, weaving from the base of one slope to another. Just when Sam’s ready to call Dean over for their next break, Dean whistles and waves with a vigor that means he’s found something. What Dean spotted is embedded into the side of one of the hills where most of the dirt has eroded away, leaving a scoured cliff of limestone trailed by creeping grape vines. 

The cliff face is pocked by shallow divots from erosion – and there, beneath a vertical seam, is a dark hole in the limestone that seems to absorb all light. Dean cocks an eyebrow at him. Should they go in? 

Sam nods. 

They approach carefully, stepping around dry twigs and leaf debris, each with a flashlight in one hand and a gun in the other. 

The entrance itself is wider than it is tall but once illuminated they can see the ceiling rises a dozen yards beyond the initial entrance to something approximating a reasonable height. Dean goes first, crawling on his belly with both arms outstretched in front of him. Sam watches Dean dig his toes in to push himself onwards, ready to dive in and pull him out by his boots if necessary.

Suddenly Dean’s boots tip upward, brushing against the ceiling, and he slithers out of sight. Sam’s heart races momentarily despite the steady light of Dean’s flashlight bobbing along. There’s a scuffle of fabric against stone and then Dean stands up fully, head barely brushing the ceiling. Had the floor remained level he would hardly have been able to sit up straight on his knees.

He pans his flashlight right-to-left then back again before turning around, waving at Sam to come through. 

Sam hoists himself onto the ledge of the entrance and copies Dean’s movements, inching along on his belly in an army crawl. With his sleeves pushed up the dirt powdered on top of the stone clings to his forearms. The point where Dean – and now Sam – slithered down is a welcome relief, even though Sam needs to stoop over to prevent his head from colliding with rock. 

The small room they ended up in is roughly hexagonal in shape with a ceiling that had fallen away in large circular swaths and walls carved out by centuries of erosion. With his back to the entrance Sam can see two other passages disappearing into the earth, one sloping downwards nearly in line with the exit and one to his left that seems to curve back towards the cliff face.

Dean, attention drawn by something on the walls to Sam’s right, glances over at Sam to confirm he’s on his feet and waves him over. On the walls are a set of colorful pictographs in reds, yellows, blacks, grays, and whites. Clumps of crosshatching, chevrons, zigzags, and concentric circles paint an unintelligible but striking swath over the uneven walls from knee to shoulder height. Dean takes out his phone and snaps a couple photos but from his face the quality is lacking.

“Maybe this is marking a burial ground,” Sam murmurs. Their research had identified a handful of long-discovered burial caves already existing in the area, and at this point a disturbed spirit makes more sense than a creature.

Dean reaches out and scratches some of the paint from the edge of a red circle. “It’s not spray paint. What?”

Sam rolls his eyes and sighs because trust Dean to touch the prehistoric art. “Let’s go.”

Down the sloping passage across from the main entrance the temperature drops steadily. Sam ducks carefully around protruding stalactites in the sections of the passage too low for him. Dean smirks but there are a few spots he has to duck just as low as Sam to get through – once they even have to crawl on hands and knees. The traversable width of the passage changes as well, pressing in so close they have to slip sideways through a honeycomb row of limestone pillars and expanding out so far Sam and Dean could each outstretch their arms and touch neither each other nor a wall.

Closer to the entrance Sam had been able to hear wind flowing from the cave and the occasional chirp of a cricket wandering the darkness. Further down those sounds have ceased, leaving an eerie stillness. Small noises – Dean’s gun clacking against the wall as he brushes up against a narrow squeeze, the carabiner on Sam’s canteen banging against its lid – whisper back from the gloom. Soft scratches of insects crawling on stone and occasional echoed drops of water from distant still-forming stalactites are the extent of the ambient noise. 

They encounter two other rooms, each with a wall patterned with colorful geometric shapes. One room branches out to other passages. Dean marks which way they went with a heavily drawn chalk arrow opposite the wall paintings. At a third point the top of a chimney drops out from the steep side of the primary passage, narrowing rapidly before plunging into darkness. Even illuminated by the flashlight it keeps its mystery, sheering around a discolored outcropping of rock without flattening into any sort of landing.

Sam inspects the edges of the chimney for nicks or gouges in the stone that could imply something large habitually slithering through. He doesn’t see any. Dean still chalks a biohazard sign above the tunnel, ignoring Sam’s eye roll, and scatters salt around the entrance. They can come back tomorrow and see if it’s disturbed if they don’t find any better leads.

They trek on. Sam loses track of how long they’ve been down here – long enough for him to start shivering beneath his thin summer clothes. There are no corpses to salt and burn, no strange phenomena to investigate. There have been no indications of inhabitation besides the old cave paintings. Dean’s EMF meter is quiet in his pocket. Even if this is the right location, their target has left no clues for them to find. 

When they reach the third room Sam spots a sloping ledge that will act well enough for a bench. Sam touches Dean’s shoulder lightly, jarring him out of his focused stare down the continuing passageway. Trying his best to hide his twitching lip from Dean’s stink eye, Sam walks pointedly towards the bench to signal he needs a break. Against a wall they can keep an eye out for anything approaching and the room is large enough for them to maneuver if necessary. 

Once sitting against the cool limestone Sam swaps a handful of peanuts for some of Dean’s M&Ms and they each wolf down an energy bar. The food goes a long way in revitalizing Sam, but when he checks the time Sam knows they need to start heading back. They’ll reach the car narrowly before dark but they’ll definitely miss dinner time. Sam elbows Dean and taps his watch. Dean does his own calculations and scowls, leaning away from the next passage regretfully.

Sam clasps his shoulder and takes one more swig of water before packing away his trash. Dean does the same then pulls out a canister of salt. He pours a thick line across the entrance of the room as they leave, much like he did to the chimney passage they had inspected earlier. He lays a few more lines at choke points in the tunnel, swapping Sam for his full canister halfway through. If anything stirs in this cave at night they’ll be able to spot its passing if not deter it from leaving altogether.

Returning to the mouth of the cave is easier now they’re retracing known ground. At the abrupt ceiling dip between the first and second rooms where the vertical clearance shrinks to less than two feet, Sam’s palms aren’t nearly as sweaty coming back as they were his first time through. Then they had been so slick they slid against the stones while Sam pictured nightmarish scenarios of the ceiling continuing at this height for hours, or compressing even further so he wouldn’t even have the space to turn his head. Now he clears the forty yards of crawlspace focusing on how nice fresh air will feel against his face.

Dean hauls him up on the other side, body just as tense as Sam. They haven’t spoken almost all day, wary of drawing something out before they could complete their recon. Compounded with the close confines of the cave the stress is affecting Dean as much as it is Sam. Their pace quickens as they approach the first room, able to pick out the light peeking through the darkness beyond the radius of their own flashlights.

After the steep incline into the first room there’s only the entrance to tackle, Sam and Dean sliding on their bellies with hands extended in front to pull themselves forward. Dean doesn’t bother to catch his fall off the short ledge onto the loamy earth on the other side, simply tucking and rolling himself away to clear space for Sam. He lays spread eagle watching until Sam is on his feet, then jumps up as well. 

Sam feels his chest expand fully for the first time in hours, drawing a great breath of air through his nose and marveling at the smells of flowering plants, damp mud and decomposing vegetation he wouldn’t be able to notice had he not been in a different kind of environment the minute previously. The sun is inching closer to the horizon, and Sam is sure if it was at its full strength his eyes would be stinging from the change in brightness. 

“Oh,” Dean groans, dropping his caution for a minute to revel in the breeze that billows his shirt, “That feels so damn good!” He shouts the last word and throws his arms upward, smacking the thin whippy branches above his head. 

It sure does. Sam laughs even as he checks to see if anything heard that. 

\----------------------------------- 

It’s harder to pick out the old path in the fading light, but they get to the main path without wandering astray and reach the car just as the last streaks of red-orange daylight fade from sight. 

Sam is rolling down the window to the Impala before Dean even pulls onto the road, still reveling in the feeling of fresh air against his face and a wide expanse of sky. He’s tempted to hang his head out the window like a dog.

“Ok,” Dean says, one hand on the steering wheel and the other cranking down his own window, “So what do we got?”

Sam pulls his head away from the window and starts ticking off points on his finger. “Someone recently cleared an old hiking trail. Five of the people that decide to go down it end up seeing a cave off-trail and go in to explore. Native American drawings in the cave are consistent with other findings in the area. It’s possible whatever’s happening may be related to a local myth or legend – except we don’t have any of those that fit the pattern of killings. Visual inspection of the cave didn’t reveal any signs of burial grounds or inhabitation by anything corporeal. Walking around didn’t seem to disturb whatever caused the affliction that the other hikers suffered.”

“So,” Dean says, picking up the thread, “Maybe more than five people found this cave, and left unharmed. We haven’t explored it all. Whatever it is could have a territory in the cave. We didn’t find any remains or other signs people were actually living there, so maybe the paintings were warnings about something deeper in the cave. I took some pictures. We can send them to Bobby tomorrow and see what he finds.”

“Hm,” Sam says. He hadn’t thought about the lack of other artifacts – no fire pits, decomposed remnants of tools, or shards of pottery. “So it could still be corporeal. But then how did it kill Floyd?”

“I’ve been thinking about that – what about some kind of poison?” 

Sam raises his eyebrows and shrugs. It’s certainly plausible.

“The five hikers,” Dean extemporizes, “get bit or, I dunno, touch some kind of giant slime trail or infected puddle of water. They don’t realize it, and touch their eyes or eat some food, and bam. The poison works its way through their system until it kills them three days later.”

Sam considers this against what they already know. “Wouldn’t that have shown up in the tox screen?”

Dean shakes his head. “Not yet. They ran the typical stuff and came back negative but the full screen is still in the backlog at the lab. And that’s assuming whatever it is even gets picked up by the screen.”

“So we’re, what, hunting some kind of giant snake?” 

Dean shrugs. “If it works in Harry Potter…”

Sam’s head whips around so fast he nearly breaks his neck. “What?”

Dean looks away from the road to meet Sam’s look blankly. “What what?”

“If it works in…” 

Dean glances at Sam again, and immediately puts on the face he wears when he’s about to protest complete innocence to something. All of a sudden the empty road demands the lion’s share of his attention.

“Isn’t there a snake in one of those books? I’m just trying to put it in geek terminology to make it easier on your overheating noggin, dog-boy.” Dean tilts his head knowingly towards the window.

“No,” Sam corrects him – gleefully. “That wasn’t a reference for me. That’s what made you think of a giant snake in the first place. Because you felt like you were crawling around in the Chamber of Secrets today.”

“Chamber of whose secrets?” Dean adds a saucy wink, clearly trying to switch tactics since counter-accusation didn’t work. No way is Sam accepting that either.

“Salazar Slytherin. Which you already know, seeing as _you read Harry Potter_.”

“Did not!” 

“Quit being such a Malfoy!”

“Hey!”

“Ha!” Sam crows, throwing his head back against the seat. “You totally did.”

Dean shifts uncomfortably, sliding his hands along the steering wheel until he decides to accept he’s been found out. “Just ‘cause your stupid books were the only thing to read,” Dean mutters, “ _Hermione_ ”

Sam sits back smugly and grins. “You’re welcome.”

“Anyway,” Dean grumps, “can we get back to the giant snake? You know, the one that’s poisoning people right under our noses?”

That refocuses Sam’s attention but doesn’t completely make the smile drop from his face. “Yeah, ok. So if they’re poisoned, something may show up in the tox screen. I’ll mention it to Bobby, see if there’s any lore about something similar.”

“Thank you,” Dean says, exaggerating the first word. 

Sam tries to come up with another theory but honestly ‘giant Harry Potter snake’ is the best option he’s heard so far. After a minute of silent reflection, Dean grunts to signal the matter is settled and punches the power button of the tape deck. Sam lets the comforting hum of the Impala and Dean crooning to Steely Dan fill the silence the rest of the way back to their motel.

\----------------------------------- 

Sam calls Bobby while Dean jumps in the shower, snagging Dean’s phone to text the pictures of the cave paintings despite the horrible glare their flashlights had caused. Then he passes along their snake idea. 

“Hm,” Bobby says, pages rustling in the background. “If a snake is what you’re looking for then I’d say a colo colo is your best bet – but I’ve never heard of one that far north much less living in a cave.”

“Colo colo?” Sam repeats, jotting the name down. 

“Mmhm, it’s a South American creature with a snake’s body and a rat’s head. But they usually live in houses, and folks only die when they stop getting fed on.” 

Sam surveys the books they have available and misses the comprehensive indexes of his college textbooks with a passion. “Thanks, Bobby, I’ll see what we can dig up.”

“Yeah,” Bobby says distractedly, still flipping through pages. “You do that. I’ll make some calls tomorrow about those paintings you found, see if any of those squiggles stand for ‘snake rat creature.’”

“Thanks,” Sam says with heartfelt gratitude. Over the years Bobby has cultivated contacts in multiple tribes who specialize in their culture’s lore – most of which isn’t even written down, much less in a book Sam and Dean possess. A network like that is worth its weight in gold for a hunter.

“No problem. Now shut the hell up so I can get back to sleep.”

Sam hangs up the phone laughing. He wonders if Bobby had fallen asleep in his library, or if his bedroom was just as stuffed with books as the first floor of his house.

He tosses Dean’s phone on the table and boxes the words ‘colo colo’ a couple times before taping it to the wall that touched the table. After his online searches return nothing but a soccer team and an Indonesian condiment Sam moves on to the more esoteric books in their collection. When Dean comes out of the bathroom he’s made some progress stacking them into piles reflecting the likelihood of finding a South American myth in them.

Scrubbing his hair dry with one of the washcloths, Dean quickly identifies the new addition to their wall of clues. “Colo colo? Bobby tell you that?”

“Yep,” Sam says, deciding to add _Menhirs, Dolmen, and Circles of Stone: The Folklore and Magic of Sacred Stone_ to the unlikely pile. “Some kind of snake rat hybrid from South America.” 

Dean shrugs and tosses his wet towel onto the foot of his bed. “Basilisk meets Scabbers, then. Alright.”

Sam snorts and points him to the piles of books. “Bobby will ask around about the paintings. I’ve been putting the ones that might cover South American myths in that pile.” Dean takes the other seat while Sam vacates his own, eager to shower off the sweat crusted on his face and arms. 

When he comes back out Dean has not only sorted the books but already began leafing through the first one, using a folded sheet of note paper to keep pace with his eyes as they move down the lines of text. Sam shifts guiltily, eyeing his bed across the room. He was planning to leave that research for tomorrow but if Dean is awake then Sam should be too.

Dean rolls his eyes without even looking up. “Dude, I can hear you getting constipated from over here. Go to sleep, I’ll finish this one up before turning in.”

“You sure?”

Dean snaps on the lamp beside him and finally looks up to smile. “Yep. You look beat, Sam. Go to sleep.” Sam hits the overhead lights and does that, hardly even remembering his head hitting the pillow. 

\----------------------------------- 

Sam wakes up in the morning to Dean lounging on the other bed with a pile of books surrounding him. He blinks a couple times to make sure his mind has caught up to what his eyes are seeing then asks hoarsely, “Did you stay up all night reading?”

Dean hums and flips another page. “Wasn’t tired. How was your beauty sleep?”

“Ugh,” Sam groans, rolling onto his back with an arm across his eyes. He hadn’t thought the cave exploration had drained him that much but Sam feels like he could sleep for another ten hours. It’s an unusual inversion of their normal roles. “What time is it?”

“’Bout eight.”

“Hn.” Eight isn’t terribly late but Sam should start working. He reaches out with his other arm and blindly gropes until Dean slaps a book in it. 

“Also,” Dean says, crinkling a bag he had stashed next to him so Sam can hear, “I got breakfast.” 

Sam sits up for that. Dean passes him a paper bag from the good bakery across town with a cooled apple danish inside. Then he nudges one of the coffee cups on the nightstand over to his side. “You’re awesome,” Sam says, chowing down. 

Dean smirks. “That’s just my bribe to make you do the rest of the research.”

“Find anything yet?” Sam asks around a mouthful of Danish.

Dean sighs and points to three books placed on the pillow next to him. “Those three mention colo colos, but they’re not very consistent about what it looks like – one says it’s an unusually large rat, another says snake with a rat face like Bobby mentioned. Third one says it’s got feathers.” Dean shakes his head. “Whatever its fugly mug looks like, they all agree that its call sounds like a wailing baby –“ Dean raises his eyes significantly before looking back at the book he was reading and paraphrasing, – “and it feeds on the ‘saliva of the residents’ of a house it infests, making them feel exhausted and bringing disease to the household.”

“Disease as in exhausting them to death?” 

“That’s what I’m thinking. Except this thing didn’t set up shop in a house, so instead of feeding on one family it’s snacking on anybody who comes into its cave.”

“Snacking on them by… eating their spit?”

Dean makes puckered kissing face. “Get your game face on, Sammy, this one’s just looking for love.”

Sam throws his coffee lid at Dean who unfortunately bats it down easily. “Gross. So you think the five hikers took a nap and this thing came crawling out and infected them?”

Dean shrugs. “Ducking into a cave for a nice midday nap to escape the heat? Yeah, maybe.” 

Sam can buy that one, too. “Anything on how to kill it?”

Dean holds up two fingers. “One,” he says, ticking the first one with his other index finger, “burn down the house around its ears. That one is a problem there because –“ 

“—you can’t set fire to limestone. Smart. So what’s two?”

“Two is some kind of exorcism ritual performed by a tribe shaman. There hasn’t been anything specific about what’s in the ritual yet but,” Dean sweeps his arms above the books on his bed, “Hopefully we can find something because I don’t exactly know any Chilean mystics. How’s your Spanish?”

Sam shrugs. “Worse than my Latin but I can get by.” 

“Great,” Dean says and points to the book Sam had tucked against his side while he was eating. “I stopped by the library. You can start on the untranslated ones.” Sam takes a fortifying draught of coffee and cracks open the first book.

“Dean?”

Dean takes a sip of his own coffee before answering. “Yeah?”

Sam pulls out the reservation slip from the card slip taped to the inside cover. “Who’s Dwayne Riley?” 

Dean snickers.

“Dude!” Sam sighs and folds the slip before tucking it back, just in case a maid got nosy. The last thing they needed was local trouble from library book theft. 

“What? They only open at nine. Dwayne probably won’t mind, I left him like five other mythology books.”

Sam decides it’s better not to engage. With one last aggrieved look he flips to the index and tries to remember his conjugations.

They research into the early afternoon, Sam slowly working his way through the new books – two others which were also reserved for Dwayne. Dean took the rest of the books Bobby sent with them. By early afternoon Dean had moved to an open legged sprawl on the ground by the foot of his bed with books scattered in front of him and Sam was at the table with his feet propped up on Dean’s chair, a book in his lap and his laptop opened to a translation site. 

“Hey,” Dean says, interrupting his own mindless humming. “You hungry?”

The only thing Sam ate since lunch yesterday had been the danish Dean brought him for breakfast. “Yep. Food?”

“Food,” Dean agrees, standing up and stretching with a groan. “Then maybe a nap. Any luck?”

“Nope. You?”

“Same. Why tell people there’s an exorcism and not give them the damn recipe?” 

Dean scowls at the books like he’s considering a good kick will solve his problem. A break is definitely in order, Sam decides. Every hunter gets sleepless nights but they tend to leave Dean easily frustrated. “Want to try the barbeque place?”

“Yeah,” Dean says, clenching his fists for a moment until his equilibrium is regained. “Let’s get some ribs and then call Bobby.”

\----------------------------------- 

The restaurant is a needed break. By the time they get back to the motel Dean has gone from frustrated to covering jaw-cracking yawns behind his arm. After they call Bobby, Sam’s going to insist he take a nap. Sam can use the break from Spanish, and Dean needs to sleep to be sharp enough for a hunt. 

They call on Dean’s phone and put in on speaker, sitting side by side on Dean’s bed so they can both hear. 

“Yeah?”

“Hey, Bobby,” Sam says. “How’s it going?”

“Sam, Dean. I was getting ready to call you. One of my buddies just got back to me about those cave paintings you saw. Do you remember how many colors it was in real life? The colors in the photo are all washed out.”

Dean pulls up the picture on his cell and they try to remember. “Yellow, red, black. Three, Bobby.” 

“No –“ Sam corrects, remembering a series of chevrons that had disappeared in the photo’s glare. “There was white, too, so four.”

“Just black or black and gray?”

Dean smirks. “Looking for something to match the color scheme in your library?”

“Yeah, Bobby,” Sam says, since he’s the one with the phone. “Gray and black. Why?”

Bobby inhales long and slow. “Well.”

Sam and Dean both perk up because that’s Bobby’s sound for when he’s about to launch into a long explanation.

“You find something?” Dean asks.

“It’s not a colo colo.”

“Not –“ Sam silently mirrors Dean’s dismayed expression to have lost half a day of research on the wrong thing. “But Bobby, the death by exhaustion and baby crying both fit!”

“Now hear me out. Like you say it almost matches so I thought I was sending you in the right direction. But I spoke to a friend who specializes in prehistoric American art. He thinks your pictures weren’t made by humans at all but by creatures called uwani azi. The name translates to ‘rock babies,’ on account of their humanlike crying. They’re cave spirits that use five colors to paint on the walls of caves they inhabit. Sound about right?”

“Shit Bobby – yeah, could be.” Dean sighs and leans back, balancing the phone on his chest. 

Sam presses, “How do you know it’s not a normal cave painting?” 

“According to him humans didn’t really use more than three colors back then – and mostly they used one or two. With everything else you’ve told me, these things fit the profile much better than that snake theory you had. Wait until you hear the rest of the lore.”

Sam leans forwards and drops his head onto his hands. What a waste their research had been. At least they hadn’t gotten as far as getting the ingredients to an exorcism that apparently wouldn’t have ever worked. “Alright. What do you have?”

There’s a rustle as Bobby likely shifts the phone to the crook of his shoulder, his voice coming in louder than it was previously. “Uwani azi are normally harmless which is why there hasn’t been a recorded attack for decades. There’s only one thing humans can do that piss them off – touching their art. After you do that, they afflict you with some kinda curse that prevents you from sleeping for three days before killing you. Just like what happened to your hikers.” 

Sam slowly turns to look at Dean who is already staring back at him. Dean weakly raises his hand and tries to buff out his fingertips on his shirt, far too little too late. On the phone Bobby continues unaware that Sam and Dean are hardly listening anymore. 

“You can’t actually kill an uwani azi, but the good news is you can cleanse the caves if you wash the paintings off using water drawn from within the cave itself. Although from what you were saying about its location, it may also be good to just collapse the cave entrance before anyone else stumbles into it because I’m not sure what’s stopping them from drawing in the same cave again once you leave.”

“Hey Bobby,” Sam says, still maintaining eye contact with Dean, “What about people that already touched the paintings?”

“Why? Did you find another hiker already?” 

“Not exactly.”

Bobby catches on quickly. “Which one of you idjits touched it?”

Dean winces. “Bobby –”

“I should have known,” he growls. 

Dean tries to defend himself, protesting, “I wanted to make sure it wasn’t just kids leaving graffiti on the trails!”

Bobby huffs unmoved. “Do you two philistines know why you never touch things at museums? It’s because you don’t know what kind of mojo has kept it around that long!”

“Oh, come on, it’s not like there was a glass case around it! They didn’t want people touching it they can put it in caves humans can’t reach!”

“Bobby,” Sam interrupts, before Bobby or Dean can get more belligerent, “Is there a cure?” He holds his breath while Bobby thinks.

“Not for sure. If I had to guess I’d say you can cleanse yourself with the same water you use to wash the walls – but it has to come from water within the same cave system the drawings are in. You’re gonna need something bigger than a puddle.”

“Ok,” Sam says, getting a handle on his racing thoughts. More research is useless; with such a close match they would have already found them if they were in the books. Bobby’s information is the best they have. Sam’s options are to go all-in or come up with a different solution out of thin air in two days. It’s not a hard choice. “Water from the caves,” Sam repeats, thinking back. “There were drips echoing yesterday, so there has to be water somewhere in there.” 

“That’s good,” Bobby says.

They just have to explore every depth of the cave in the next day and a half until they find it. Sam swallows. “Thanks. We’ll talk to you later.” He gets up and starts packing – all the energy bars they have left, dense caloric snacks, extra socks and batteries. 

Dean sits up from his exhausted sprawl to watch Sam. How had he not noticed the deep purple underneath Dean’s eyes earlier? 

“Sam? What are you doing?”

Sam lobs Dean’s half-full backpack towards him. “Packing. We can get to the cave within four hours and start looking. I want as much of a head start as we can get on this one.” 

“What, now? You planning on looking all through the night?”

Sam shrugs. “Not like it matters underground.”

Dean concedes that one although he looks a bit unnerved at the reminder of how dark it could be. Sam snags the canteens and refills them from the bathroom tap while Dean starts packing their heavy ordinance – consecrated iron, silver, anything that has the chance of stopping a rock creature in its tracks. 

“Bobby,” he calls to the phone still lying on his bed, “We’ll call you in a day or two.” Dean’s voice lilts at the end so his statement turns into a question.

“Both you boys better,” Bobby agrees quietly. “The minute you’re back.”

“Yeah. Take care.” Dean hangs up as Sam screws the lids on their canteens. In short order they were ready to head out the door.

“You good to drive?” 

Dean scoffs. “This isn’t the first time an art school wannabe kept me up all night.” He tosses Sam a bag of half the ammunition with a smirk, tucks away his pearl-handled pistol and jiggles his keys. Sam snags his own pistol from the drawer and follows him out. He checks the clock on the nightstand before shutting the door.

It’s half past three in the afternoon. Dean has a day and a half to live. 

\----------------------------------- 

Between the drive and the hike both on- and off-trail it takes them nearly all of the four hours Sam had estimated. The sun sits low in the sky casting long shadows that nearly swallow up the cave entrance. Dean had done well in the car but as the hike stretched along the miles he stopped trying to suppress his yawns. 

Sam tried to think of people who had gone without sleep for multiple days. There was the math major on his floor who had stayed up completing a semester of calculus homework – but he hadn’t lasted longer than two days. Besides, Sam knew from his own bouts of sleepless nights that there’s a significant difference between the nights up you plan for versus the nights up you wish you didn’t have to experience.

Not that any of the reflection matters. Dean is awake and he’ll keep being awake until Sam can track down enough water to wash off the rock baby mojo. 

This time Sam slithers into the cave first without bothering to draw his gun so he can better leverage himself along. Out of an abundance of caution Sam checks for any rock babies, but as Bobby said they aren’t directly aggressive towards humans. The cave looks just as uninhabited as it had the first time around.

Sam waves Dean through and turns to scowl at the paintings but something glittering on the floor catches his eye. 

When Dean pulls himself into the room Sam is crouched by the opening of the passage they had gone down last time. The salt line was angrily struck through with a series of jagged zigzags. The movement had been so violent it scattered grains of salt all the way to the other side of the room. “Guess they didn’t like your art either,” Sam tells Dean.

Dean kicks the salt into a pile off to the side. “Cry babies,” he mutters. Then he asks, “What do you think, up or down?”

The upwards sloping passage is entirely unexplored. The downwards passage is three hours of dry caves but with the sound of dripping water. “Water flows downhill.”

Dean nods and takes the lead.

It’s their third time through the passages in the past two days. Sam thinks he recognizes some of the stalactites and accurately remembers two points where the cave is about to take a sudden turn. They aren’t being as careful the first time given they know what to expect but they’re probably moving as slow. Sam doesn’t think Dean realizes how his footsteps are dragging and his missteps on the uneven floor are becoming more common. The hiker they’d found and the one who’d checked herself into the hospital had both been nearly comatose on the third day. Sam clenches his hand around the face of his watch and refuses to allow himself to look. Counting down this early would be counter-productive.

Sam stays behind Dean to make it less obvious he’s slowing down for him, lurking within arm’s reach in an overabundance of caution. 

They crawl through the nerve-wracking squeeze once more. “You know,” Dean grumbles after he doesn’t duck low enough and hits the top of his head against a protrusion on the ceiling, “I keep thinking how much easier this hunt would be if we had done this one as kids.” 

Sam grunts and focuses on staring at Dean’s muddy boots, ignoring the walls at his periphery and the way his chin scrapes against the floor. 

“I mean,” he continues, his body muffling the sound so it seems more distant than it is, “Think about having an extra foot or two of headspace. Not to mention better knees. This crawling around is killing mine.”

“That’s because you’re a reminiscent old fart.”

Dean’s laugh expands his chest until his back brushes the ceiling. “I think I’m entering the hysteric phase of sleep deprivation because that should not be funny.”

Sam doesn’t exactly smile but he can feel the ghost of it there. “Just keep crawling, grandpa.”

“Speak up, sonny! Can’t hear you!”

“I said –“ 

Dean’s feet suddenly pull away and then stand flat on the ground. Sam hadn’t even realized they were at the end of the squeeze. He scuttles through the rest with a relieved sigh and Dean slaps him on the back as he stands up. “Said what?”

“I said your feet smell like ass.”

“Aw, how sweet.”

They really should stay quiet and alert but Dean hasn’t slept in nearly thirty hours and Sam’s grateful for any excuse to forget about the watch ticking away on his wrist. Most of their energy still goes to walking rather than talking, but occasionally Dean will break the silence with a new insult he comes up with for the uwani azi or Sam will point out a cool feature in the cave. Nothing stirs in the dark corners of the cave. The only things that have changed since yesterday are the aggressively defaced salt lines along their path. They continue retracing their steps. 

Dean kicks aside each salt line with a scowl. “Passive aggressive chunks of gravel,” he murmurs into the cave. It whispers odd remnants of his words back at them. 

At the room with branching passages Sam has a moment of indecision. Dean notices at the mouth of yesterday’s passage, turning around just outside the room itself. “Sam?”

Sam illuminates the cave on his left, wondering if the floor slopes steeper downward than the one they were about to follow. They have no idea how long the cave goes; who knows how much time could be wasted if they pick the wrong one here. 

“Hey.” Dean punctuates his word with a whistle to make Sam turn. “We following the water echoes or what?”

Sam shakes himself out of the momentary indecision. Yes, they are. Water may flow downwards but he trusts his ears. The sound of dripping water is faint but gradually grows louder as they continue on. Sam chides himself to be more focused. They crawl through rock formations and tight spaces until finally the third room looms out of the darkness. 

Sam considers calling for a break like last time to restore some of their energy, but Dean’s shoulders are set in a manner that means he’s still going because he won’t be able to start again after he stops. He ignores the room’s paintings and walks straight to his last salt line, sweeping it aside like all the others. The follow through of his kick makes him stagger a step in the opposite direction. Instead of taking a break Sam gives in to the urge to check his watch as he crosses the room. His stomach lurches to see it’s past midnight; Sam would have guessed it wasn’t yet eleven. Time seems to flow faster down here, leaving Sam unprepared for the deterioration of his brother. How long can Dean keep going under his own steam? 

Finally expanding into unexplored space, Sam and Dean have to slow their pace even further. The cave seems less refined here, the floor and walls peppered with discolored boulders of other types of rock that stubbornly jut from the limestone. They end up climbing more than walking, half-crouched with a flashlight in one hand and the other reaching out for balance. Small gravel occasionally falls loose when Sam and Dean scrabble up the side of a stone and once or twice a boulder with a top oversized to its bottom shifts beneath their feet. 

Sam’s not sure if it’s his imagination reacting to the growing patter of water echoing through the passage but the air seems more humid and he swears there’s a faint rut in the floor from what may have once been a river. The gravel seems more concentrated there, like a flash flood had swept loose stones into the depths of the cave. Even as the cave crowds in on them Sam’s optimism slowly rises. It may take another hour or so to reach the end of this passage but he’s confident there will be water. The dripping is too constant for the cave to be entirely dry.

Sam’s careful optimism dies a quick death when Dean suddenly stops, flashlight ceasing its horizontal sweeping of the path ahead. The passage is too narrow for Sam to stand next to Dean and too short for Sam to look over his head. Instead he bends his knees further and cranes his already crooked neck to peer around Dean’s hunched shoulders.

In front of them is a rocky overhang that abruptly cuts the traversable area of the passage to a fraction of its previous size. Sam’s not sure either of them could fit through it even on their bellies. Of course it is purely an academic question because within an arm’s length the passage bubbles into a dead end. Sam thinks he’s hallucinating because the sound of dripping is even louder now and underpinned by what sounds like the distant roaring of a river. 

Dean kicks a loose piece of gravel towards the wall that looks like it’s slowly melting downwards. It clatters and bounces before tumbling into a narrow seam Sam hadn’t noticed in the uneven shadows, one that runs unevenly across the entire width of the floor. Similar to the wall above it the rock looks like it was slowly melted over time, whorls of different colors dripping down its face like wax. The pebble clatters out of sight for a good ten seconds bouncing like a pinball. Sam listens for any kind of splash but if it made such a sound it was drowned out by the accumulating echoes of rock striking more rock.

As the echoes die off Sam can’t think of anything to say. He was so sure –

“I don’t think we’re getting through this one without a jackhammer.” Dean twists to the side and slumps against the wall letting his head fall back with a sigh. His eyes droop close in a parody of sleep. “How about we go back to the motel and test these Picasso wannabes against some benzodiazepine?” 

Sam snorts and allows himself to slump as well. Dean can rest while Sam plans their next move. This isn’t a total dead end. They’ve confirmed a river flows somewhere below them in the rock. Step two is finding the right path to it. The narrow seam in front of them cannot be the only way down. There are three other passages they haven’t tried yet. The next one they should try is the second of three passages in the room Dean marked with a large arrow. It looked like it sloped downwards and it curved in the same direction as the passage they were in now. 

Sam’s feet ache when he pulls himself away from the support of the wall. His soft groan doesn’t rouse Dean at all. “Dean?” Sam reaches out to shake his shoulder and freezes when Dean’s eyes flutter open. Small particles of dust drift from Dean’s face. Sam reaches out to run a thumb below one of his eyes and Dean lethargically bats it away before Sam can touch anything. 

“Leave it,” he mutters. “I’m fine.”

“You’re crying limestone,” Sam points out. This is far from just tired. How long until his symptoms become acute? They have a lot more ground to cover, and if Dean can’t make it on his own power they have even less time to find the water source than before.

“Am not,” Dean grumbles. He leverages himself to his feet by essentially lurching against the opposite wall. Face haggard with exhaustion he stares at Sam and visibly struggles with himself for a moment. “I might be pretty useless,” Dean finally admits. “The room is spinning a little.” 

Sam doesn’t press further, recognizing Dean’s peculiar sense of concession for what it is. Dean’s not fine but he doesn’t know how hard it’s going to hit him until it does. There’s only one solution to this problem. “We’re going to head back to the room with the arrow and try a second passage.” 

Without any room to switch their order Sam leads the way back, making an effort to cater to Dean’s speed. It was easier when he was behind. He could keep an eye on Dean without having to contort his body into awkward positions and his arms were always out to give Dean a boost when he needed one. Even with Sam trying to move slowly it becomes much more apparent how labored Dean’s pace is. 

This time Sam follows through on his thought to call for a rest when they work their way back to the third cavern. They can’t sleep but at least the food will help them regain a complementary kind of energy. They’ve hiked miles already and potentially have miles to go. It’s not the kind of environment to skip meals in. 

After their late dinner of energy bars and protein snacks, Sam can feel his eyelids drooping. The stress of Dean’s condition, combined with the incongruent boredom of climbing through hours of claustrophobic caves, has wiped Sam’s energy. He feels guilty because at least he had slept the night before; Dean has been up for nearly twice that with a nasty curse sapping his energy at an accelerated rate. 

Next to Sam, Dean’s head is nodding erratically, the last bite of an energy bar hanging from his nerveless fingers. His foot twitches dangerously close to the canteen he’d put down without screwing the top back on. Sam returns to worrying about what he will do if Dean becomes unable to follow under his own steam. Can Sam carry him through miles of tunnels alone? Should he deposit him in one of these rooms and hope he’s got enough time to both find the water source and carry enough back in his small canteen that cleansing Dean of the curse will work? Sam prefers the former if at all possible to prevent their remaining time from being split in half. 

Of course whichever way is inferior to keeping Dean on his own feet. They need to cover as much ground before the curse progresses that far. Sam bumps Dean’s shoulder with his own, steadying the canteen so it doesn’t fall over. Dean jolts and drops his energy bar. 

“What?”

“Come on, we’re heading out again.”

“Aren’t you gonna… take a rest?” The tension in Sam’s shoulders grows when he hears how disjointed Dean’s speech is becoming. It’s like he needs to pause every three words to regather his thoughts. “You also had… long day.” 

“I’ll sleep when you do,” Sam tells him. 

He watches Dean react to his words, first with eyebrows drawn together in concentration like he’s listening long after to the echo of Sam’s words. Finally Dean grunts wordlessly and stands up with a clear effort. “Princess and the pea,” he accuses. “Not enough mattress.”

Sam forces himself to smile even though he doesn’t think Dean’s paying enough attention to notice it.

\----------------------------------- 

The second passage is as much of a disappointment as the first. Mercifully it’s an easy walk and even at their current pace a short way to the dead end. The closed room is the largest they’ve found so far with the obligatory five-color cave paintings decorating one wall but the ceiling is peppered in the largest stalactites they’ve seen in the cave so far. The ceiling is too high for Sam to accurately judge how large the formations are but Sam thinks a few may reach over six feet. They stretch down from the ceiling in large clusters carpeted by delicate straw-like structures and Sam feels like he’s staring up and seeing the canopy of an odd forest. 

If the clock wasn’t ticking in the back of his mind Sam would have liked to explore that room some more. As it was, he give it a quick assessment to confirm there were no other tunnels except the one they’d emerged from. His glance to the ceiling was interested but brief as he caught Dean on the shoulder and gently steered him around. 

The final passage to explore goes on for much longer and is more complicated to traverse. Sam thinks they’re sloping downwards more often than they’re climbing up but it’s hard to tell. Once more, there’s a faint channels running along the floor that looks like it was the beginning etches of a riverbed. Sam dares to hope again because the only option they have after this is the upwards passage from the first room. 

The hours of exertion have exacted their toll on Sam; his mind cycles through irrelevant snippets of thought and his body continues without requiring much conscious input. The surrounding darkness pushes in oppressively and the echoes of their own movements begin to burn unpleasantly in Sam’s ears. Like all persistent background noise it had sat unobtrusively in Sam’s subconscious until a moment of mental dissonance brought it roaring to the forefront, not to be subdued again. 

Sam can’t imagine what Dean must be going through. Dean continues to put one foot in front of the other and turns according to Sam’s gentle steering, but the last time Sam tried to engage him verbally Dean had stared uncomprehendingly for a long moment. He’d had to visibly draw together his concentration before asking Sam to repeat the question. He has the wherewithal to duck his head and keep his balance which is all Sam’s going to ask of him right now. 

As zoned out as he is, Sam doesn’t spot the glimmer of sunlight until they’re nearly on top of it. He stares at it in a stupor for a long moment, trying to figure out if he’d actually taken them the wrong way. He hadn’t. The route is different than the one to the entrance they’d come. It’s a second entrance. 

When Sam pulls Dean into the morning light they both need to cover their eyes until they’ve adjusted. Sam sits Dean down for another break in the fresh air. He isn’t able to get him to eat much. Dean sips absently at his canteen when Sam pushes it into his hands but his lips are cracked in the early stages of dehydration. Sam isn’t able to eat much either, exhaustion souring his stomach, but he forces down what he can and makes sure to drink a ration of water. He pushes Dean into the trees to go to the bathroom and discovers they must have come out on top of the hill that the original entrance cuts through the base of. 

He spends a few minutes trying to spot the entrance before a sudden bolt of panic makes Sam turn around and check that Dean has returned to the entrance instead of wandering off. If he becomes as footloose as Floyd had been then Sam may waste hours tracking him.

Luckily Dean still has the presence of mind to return to the entrance, hunched over on the log with his head resting in his hands.

“Dean?” Sam asks. “You okay?”

His fingers curl in his hair and his answer seems to fall out without Dean meaning to say it. “I’m so tired.”

Sam bites his lip, wishing there was something more he could do. “I know,” he says instead. “Just hold on a little longer.” Sam checks his watch. It’s 11 AM. If the curse completes at sundown, Dean has a little over ten hours. Depending on how long Dean can keep moving, Sam can halve that for the time he has to find the river.

Dean stands up and looks around hazily. There’s limestone caught in the corner of his eyes. Sam wonders how much he’s actually processing right now. He grabs Dean’s hand and leads him back inside to the imprint of a dried pool. Sam swallows down his disappointment and wishes they were hunting in one of Kentucky’s stormier months. Perhaps then it would be filled with water. Instead, he and Dean tread through the dried limestone husk and continue their search down the passage.

Sam had kept a mental tally of the cave system as they explored it: four rooms, four distinct traversable passages. One way had been too narrow for human traversal; one way ended in a dead end room. They were currently on the third passage with one to go. Sam refuses to believe the water is inaccessible, which means they will find it either on this passage or the next. That mental math is one of the thoughts repeatedly churning through his mind as they climb. This one or the next.

This passage climbs back to the surface but then sharply descends on an angle so steep Sam and Dean resort to sliding down on the seat of their pants, using their hands to brake. Like a playground slide they skid down and around a gradual bend until they are deposited into another room. 

Sam nearly updates his count to five rooms until he notices a fine scattering of salt on the floor and a distant window of natural daylight. Crouching down to view the entrance and then reluctantly walking over to the swept aside pile of salt, Sam feels his frustration abruptly crest. 

_They were back at the beginning of the cave _.__

__There weren’t four distinct passages after all. One had been a loop. There was no next option, no path to reach the water Sam heard roaring beneath their feet. Given a jackhammer and a couple months maybe Sam could return to the end of the first passage and drill their way down – but what could he do in less than eight hours?_ _

__Dean, swaying unsteadily in the center of the room, turns so abruptly he staggers sideways. Craning his head to look towards the painted wall he asks, “Do you hear that?”_ _

__Sam stills, sweeping his own flashlight across the far wall. He doesn’t see anything out of place. “Hear what?”_ _

__Dean shudders and ineffectually grasps for the word. “Like a baby. But _not_. You didn’t sound like that.”_ _

__“Crying?” Sam clarifies. “You hear them crying?”_ _

__“Yeah.”_ _

__Sam curses. What else can they do without water? Salt had already proven useless; iron is likely to be just as ineffective. If other aspects of the cave worked as well as water was rumored to, maybe they could break off some stalactites for weapons. But that assumes the uwani azi would be physically present, and that the spell would end with their death. From what they’ve seen this is a hands-off kind of curse. The rock babies won’t get within striking distance while Dean is dying. The brothers’ usual warding materials already failed to protect Floyd, and Sam doesn’t have anything beyond the basics on him. Sam’s hands start to shake when he thinks about sitting here for eight hours waiting for Dean to die._ _

__The realization comes like a chill down his spine. Sam has miscounted the tunnels again._ _

__There is one more they haven’t explored yet, one which clearly can’t be linked to any of the others: the chimney passage. Sam hasn’t counted it because it doesn’t look big enough for him to squeeze through. But suppose he manages to wriggle past the narrow choke point and into the drop-off below? Water flows downhill after all._ _

__Sam berates himself for being ten kinds of stupid when it occurs to him. This should have been his first plan when the main passage became a dead end. He let his reluctance to crawl through tight areas influence his decision making, and now he’s run down the clock to dangerous levels. Who knows how much cave is left to explore beyond that point?_ _

__Sam grabs Dean’s elbow, and he readily follows Sam away from the spectral voices. For the third time, they descend into the cave._ _

__

__\-----------------------------------_ _

__

__The biohazard sign Dean had drawn on their first pass now strikes Sam as a bad omen. Sam doesn’t think of himself as superstitious – but that line is drawn a little differently for a hunter. He looks over at Dean and Dean looks at the yawning pit in front of them._ _

__“I don’t like this,” Dean says._ _

__Sam couldn’t agree more._ _

__“Dean,” Sam says, drawing Dean’s gaze to him. “I’m going down first. If I yell, follow me.”_ _

__Dean blinks rapidly while he listens to Sam’s instructions but eventually nods. He’s still in there – just struggling against an overwhelming tide of exhaustion and the subsequent impairment of higher function. Sam is just grateful he can still move under his own direction. If he uses Floyd as their benchmark Dean is doing well. Sam gives him a reassuring nod before turning his attention to the chimney._ _

__The passage is too steep to walk down, just short of a direct fall. If he jumps, Sam will probably just break his legs at the bottom. Sam sits at the edge of the chimney and extends his legs so they press against the opposite side. He braces his hands against the sheer walls on either side and slowly eases his hips off the ledge. After walking his legs down he can press his lower back against the side of the chimney he’d been sitting above. Sam presses with his back and his legs, repositions his arms, and walks his legs down a little further._ _

__Moving in this way – arms, press, walks his legs, slide his back, press, arms, repeat – Sam can shimmy down the shaft in a controlled manner. It gets harder the further down he goes, arms tucked in too tight and legs too long to extend all the way so he has to press against the wall using the tips of his boots instead of the soles._ _

__Sam is sweating heavily before he gets to the choke point but his perspiration worsens when he sees the size of the gap he has to squeeze through. Bringing his arms up to his shoulders and then extending them down to the opening, Sam thinks he may have enough room to get through – barely. It’s not just the shoulder width that’s intimidating but the space for his chest front-to-back as well._ _

__Sam takes a couple deep breaths before he drops his legs from the wall, hands placed like he’s posing to perform a tricep dip with his legs hanging straight down. He slips one foot through and then the other, twisting them side to side to keep his jeans from catching on the rock. Sam’s feet get swallowed up, then his calves, then the bottom half of his thighs. Before committing entirely to his desperate plan Sam kicks his legs the small amount they can move and tries to feel for his feet catching on anything rough. The first time his toes slide off with hardly any friction. The second time he gets a small catch. The third time he finds a section of rock bumpy enough for him to get a good foothold._ _

__Sam exhales slowly and double checks his grip. He’s going to do this. After a mental count of three he lowers himself down until his hips catch against the rock. Swinging his legs in tandem on the other side of the vise, Sam gradually slips his hips down. The pressure is uncomfortably tight. Sam twists his torso side to side and feels himself slide another inch. The lip of the vise catches against the bottom of his t-shirt. Wedged as firmly as he is, he frees a hand to tuck it in. If he catches bare skin on rock, he thinks the pressure might scrape him enough to bleed._ _

__It’s already getting harder to breathe with just the bottom of his chest cavity compressed. Sam wonders if it’s psychological or not. Either way, he’s not looking forward to how it’ll feel when he’s trying to fit his whole body through. But if it’s this or Dean dying in front of him it’s not really a choice. Sam takes a few deep breaths to saturate his blood oxygen levels and starts wriggling again. With determined twists and rolls and wriggles Sam descends to nearly his armpits. His ribs are being crushed out of shape. He can feel them strain to expand every time Sam draws breath. Since they can’t it leaves Sam light-headed._ _

__His body wants to panic from the lack of oxygen but Sam knows that will just get him stuck. He forces himself to exhale, kicks his legs out to catch a foothold, and raises his arms above his head. Throwing his hips into the movement Sam wriggles down further. It’s impossible to breathe. His adrenaline is spiking. Sam raises his arms as high as they will go so his shoulders press against either side of his ear. His feet slip down the wall of the chimney as Sam tries to inch his body along._ _

__His eyes are closed but Sam can feel the moment his hips clear the bottom of the squeeze. His torso follows next, armpits scraping the whole way against either side of the squeeze even through his shirt. Sam’s chin catches against the rock and he quickly tilts it sideways, feeling stone graze one cheek. Walking down the wall with his feet and purposefully pressing his arms outward once they’re in the squeeze to make sure his descent is a controlled one, Sam finally makes it through with a heartfelt gasp of relief._ _

__Sam presses his back and legs against opposite walls like he’d done above, blindly inching downwards until his head and arms clear. After that Sam takes a moment to catch his breath. On this side of the squeeze the incline is not as steep. As long as he uses the walls for balance, he can walk his way down._ _

__Sam has to think for a long moment about whether or not to call for Dean to follow him down. It all comes down to the math again; without Dean, Sam has to find the water source in half the time because he’ll need to carry it back. With that in mind Sam moves himself out of the immediate landing area and calls up for Dean to follow._ _

__For a heart stopping minute Sam hears nothing. He wonders if Dean’s finally succumbed to his exhaustion. Then he hears the slow deliberate scuff of boots and jeans against stone. His arms shake the entire way down, but he makes it to the choke point without slipping. Peering up at him from the other side of the choke point, Sam can see the exertion it’s costing Dean to stay focused and keep himself moving._ _

__Squeezing through is simultaneously harder because Dean’s nearly at the edge of consciousness, and easier because Sam can mind Dean’s descent and support his weight from below while Dean twists his body through the choke point. It’s possible he had more room to maneuver than Sam did, but whatever advantage that would give him was cancelled out by Dean’s fugue state. He makes it through, barely. That’s all Sam needs._ _

__Inching along the steep incline with arms outstretched to keep himself from tumbling head over heels down it, Sam leads them on their way._ _

__After a dizzying number of spirals down the passage the ground finally flattens out – and the ceiling collapses into another squeeze. Sam nearly sobs in frustration. The roaring sound of rushing water teases them onwards, but Sam hates the cramped spaces with a passion born of having to drag all 6’3” of himself through them. Regardless he drops onto his belly and shoves himself forwards._ _

__It seems to last forever. The only assurance Sam has that Dean hasn’t fallen behind are his labored breaths and the occasional bump of a hand against his boots. Sam tries to wipe his mind of thoughts and just concentrate on pulling himself forward by his fingertips, catching the sides of his boots against the rock and pushing himself another inch, reaching out his arms and repeating the process._ _

__He thinks the slickness against his palms is just sweat until he realizes it’s too cool. Panning his flashlight what little length he can, Sam sees the whole cave is damp floor to ceiling. It begins to soak into his shirt but Sam notes both occurrences with an unfettered jolt of happiness. He can’t tell if the roaring in his ears is coming from his pumping blood or the water ahead. Either way it reinvigorates Sam. He inch-pulls along, pushes down the panic of being unable to turn his head, ignores the burning in his forearms and his calves._ _

__Finally, after what seems like a day crawling forward, Sam pulls himself out of the crawlspace and into a cave with high cathedral arches of stone – and taking up over half the floor space, a roaring underground river that launches out of an incision in the stone and roils across the cave. Sam only looks at it for a moment before returning to the squeeze to crawl back to where Dean was slowly working his way along and help pull him forwards._ _

__Tumbling out into the cave for the second time is just as good as the first. In fact it’s even better because he can grab Dean by the arm and tow him forwards, making him strip off his shirt and practically dunking him head first into the water. It’s ice cold but Sam makes him submerge his hands up to his elbows, rub the limestone from his eyes, scrub his chest clean of sweat and the malicious curse of the uwani azi. Sam uses the edge of Dean’s dry shirt to wipe the limestone sweat tracks off his face and laughs in relief when they don’t come back._ _

__Dean staggers in a daze, smiling back at Sam but entirely too exhausted to say or do much. Sam pushes him down onto the smoothest area of limestone. Dean topples gracelessly, stretched out on his back with arms stretched by his side. Sam lifts his head and settles it on his knee, stroking down Dean’s forehead to encourage him to close his eyes. The tumultuous roar of the river and its echoes nearly drown out Dean’s last murmur before he collapses into an exhausted sleep. “No touching the artwork,” he says. “Got it, Bobby.”_ _

__The last thing Sam remembers is the cave giving his laughter back to him._ _

__

__\-----------------------------------_ _

__

__Sam wakes to the roaring of the underwater river and the slimy chill of water soaked in his clothes. He fumbles for the flashlight switch and rolls over with a grunt when his back twinges from napping on top of unyielding stone. Dean is still asleep. Sam considers leaving him but the promise of dry clothes and a comfortable back seat prompts Sam to give Dean an experimental shake. Dean’s back is worse than Sam’s anyway; it’ll be better to get him to crash on something soft._ _

__Dean groans and curls himself into a ball. He responds the second time Sam prods him, batting Sam away with one hand and a sleep drunk, “What?”_ _

__“Come on,” Sam tells him. “We’re heading back to the Impala.”_ _

__Name-dropping the car makes Dean blearily look around, eyes widening at the rapids just a few feet away. “Are we still in the cave?”_ _

__“Yeah.” Sam tries a few small stretches to work out the kinks in his muscles. “How much do you remember?”_ _

__“Just a –“ Dean’s jaw cracks with his oversized yawn. “Just a lot of rocks and the creepy crying. How long have we been down here?”_ _

__Sam checks his watch. “It’s 4 in the morning, so about… thirty-two hours?”_ _

__Dean’s eyes widen. “Jesus.”_ _

__“Yeah,” Sam says. His skin is itching for sunlight and a breeze. “You can sleep more in the car once we dry off.”_ _

__Dean’s perfectly timed shiver gets him on his feet and moving. The squeezes back are difficult to navigate, especially since this is the first time Dean remembers going through it, but without the bubbling panic of last night i¬¬¬¬¬t’s much easier for Sam to keep himself centered and control his breathing. He goes first, showing Dean it’s feasible to slowly pull himself through the bend and the choke point in the chimney passage._ _

__Dean swears like a sailor the whole time he’s working his body through with short corkscrew twists. Sam empathizes. He’s also relieved to hear his brother talking normally again instead of following Sam in eerie silence. The plaintive, I’m so tired, Dean had mumbled at the cave entrance the day before is going to haunt Sam for months._ _

__The first squeeze they’d had to traverse now feels positively breezy. They army crawl through, Sam reveling in the freedom he has to fully expand his lungs the whole way through._ _

__Dean had refilled his canteen with water from the underground river. He gleefully splashes the first set of uwani azi paintings they return to. Where the water strikes the paintings begin to bubble and hiss, the colors blending together into the same brown as the walls. Sam jumps when he hears outraged wails rise in a chorus of protest. Dean scowls and hollers back, “Yeah, that Jackson Pollock revenge isn’t so much fun when I’m ruining _your_ stuff, is it?” _ _

__A similar outburst happens when Dean splashes the wall of the first room. They’ll need to come back for the rest of the paintings and to figure out how to permanently close both cave entrances. That’s a task Sam happily leaves for tomorrow. He crawls into the sunrise with a heartfelt sigh and flops on the dirt, rolling just far enough for Dean to exit as well. Only a few more miles back to the car and then Sam and Dean can finally sleep._ _

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for SPN Summergen 2017, and has been edited from the original challenge posting. There's probably still some editing improvements that need to be made, but I've been meaning to post this for a few months now.
> 
> Uwani Azi are not my creation; I pulled the basics from the book "Menhirs, Dolmen, and Circles of Stone: The Folklore and Magic of Sacred Stone" (you may notice Sam moved that book into the 'unlikely' pile during their research phase :)). A snipped is available on Google Books if you're interested.


End file.
